Sydney and Violet Read online

  Zagreus was not willing to be ejected quite so easily, however. He asked Mr. Horty, Lewis’s surrogate for T. S. Eliot, whether he had done anything to warrant his being turned out, but Horty did not wish to become involved. “ ‘You leave me out of it,’ he said, wriggling his lean bottom, and pulling down tightly his mirthless upper lip as though dryly to sip a little tea.” When Zagreus was finally departing, Lionel stood at the top of the stairs shooing him away “with gestures to hasten the departure of an animal. Kein’s batrachian muzzle stuck over with its bristling military mustache—the toffee eyes behind the spectacles—stared solemnly down—the black loosely-hanging frustrum of the cranky trunk above the rail, and, beneath the ascending animated soffit, the shining linen—the cigar held in the hand remained a moment as though commanded to stand still by some super-natural agency—immobilized to gaze inscrutably down into the twilit well of the hall.” (Although it does nothing to help clarify Lewis’s tortured syntax and the eccentric language of the quotation above, here are three definitions for those readers who are semi-illiterate like me: “batrachian” means froglike, a soffit is the underside of a beam or other architectural element, and a frustrum is the part of a conical solid left after cutting off part of the top portion, leaving a plane parallel to the base.)

  Aside from offering another angle of vision on Sydney and Violet, Lewis’s magnum opus, The Apes of God, exemplifies the outer limit of modernist satire. It is more ambitious, more malicious, more eccentric, more radical, more repetitive, more irritating, and much longer than the relatively puny satirical works of Lawrence, Huxley, Aldington, and the Sitwells. In its way, it was the appropriate culmination of a mostly trivial trend in English literature. But in another sense it was, for better or for worse, sui generis, a class unto itself, bearing little resemblance to the satire that preceded or followed it. It wasn’t, however, if I can be so bold as to vigorously disagree with the great Yeats, worthy of comparison, favorable or otherwise, with the works of Jonathan Swift. Lewis’s mess of a novel bears no resemblance whatsoever to the superbly crafted and bitingly effective works of Swift, whether brief but singularly devastating like A Modest Proposal or extended and unceasingly brilliant like Gulliver’s Travels.

  Sydney’s work on the other hand was about as far as you could get from Lewis’s sardonic, static satire. He captured the inner lives of his characters through meticulous observation of their evolving behavior. Unlike Lewis’s iconoclastic work, for the time in which it was written Sydney’s was more conventional than radical—a few critics even compared A True Story to nineteenth-century realist masters such as Stendhal and Thackeray. Lewis’s writings mirror the anger and turmoil that tortured him his whole life, while Sydney’s novel reflects the journey of his soul from extreme misery as a young child, a schoolboy, and an unhappily married man to eventual exquisite happiness with Violet and in his life as a writer.

  After the publication of Lewis’s magnum opus, which was not a commercial success, his economic situation and his health deteriorated to a point where he had to swallow his pride once again and appeal to his old benefactors, whom he had so recently and publicly maligned, for support. In February of 1933 he wrote to Sydney to thank him for a fifty-pound check, and in March he wrote twice to Violet, first telling her he was sorry to hear about her ice-skating accident and that he hoped her wrist was better and then to say he was sorry illness had taken her and Joyce to Zurich at the same time. And in May he wrote to Sydney with a pathetic plea. He thanked him for an additional twenty-five pounds and said he had been ill for six months and could not work, otherwise he would not have asked for money. He complained about his inability to afford the meanest studio or, for that matter, even an easel, and then asked Sydney to help him mount a retrospective exhibition of his paintings. “Is it really out of the question,” he wrote, “for you, one of the few people who care for pictures in London, to do something to facilitate this?” Finally, he told Sydney how grateful he was for his help. I don’t know whether Sydney made an effort on his behalf, but no such exhibition ever took place.

  CHAPTER 12

  VIOLET ALONE

  Sydney and Violet had owned and rented houses in the country before, but none really became their home until Abinger Manor did. Perhaps it had to do with their age, with a desire for a quieter life. They bought it when Sydney was sixty-five and Violet was fifty-nine. By then Sydney had been diagnosed with coronary artery disease, for which the only treatment at the time was rest and digitalis. Or it could have been the war. Before the German invasion of Poland they divided their time between London and Surrey. But when the fighting began they moved to the country full-time except for occasional brief excursions to London. They probably thought it would be safer.

  The large multilevel seventeenth-century stone dwelling with sharply pitched roofs and a portico at the back was comfortable and of historic interest, but architecturally undistinguished. It was beautifully situated on a hilltop surrounded by rolling countryside. The house was built by John Evelyn, a diarist whose works are now mostly forgotten because he had the misfortune of being a contemporary of Samuel Pepys. Edward Beddington-Behrens invited the distinguished archaeologist Louis Leakey to examine the surrounding area and Leakey thought it could have been the site of the oldest settlement in Britain, but more recent scholarship has cast some doubt on that assessment. Sydney, who had learned something about landscaping from John Nash, and might have been inspired by the Italian gardens of his friend Arthur Kitson, designed the garden with the help of the Schiffs’ secretary, Freda Almond (Gardner after she married), whose father was a horticulturist.

  There was a small cottage on the property, where at Sydney and Violet’s invitation Max Beerbohm and his American wife, Florence, lived from early in 1939 until the end of the war. The Schiffs had few visitors during those years and infrequently socialized with the Beerbohms. In fact the two couples were so concerned about their privacy that they agreed never to talk to each other in person unless a formal arrangement had been made beforehand by letter. If either couple had anything to communicate they wrote a letter, which they did frequently, or if it was more or less urgent they used the telephone or left a note in the other’s mailbox or under the door. This agreement, however, was sometimes honored in the breach. The two houses were only about fifty yards apart and they were separated by a hedge and a low wall. On a summer’s day Sydney and Max would often stroll along together on their respective sides of these barriers, “dressed in the light gray or lavender suits they both loved,” deep in conversation. Apart from the constraint on communications, the only restriction placed on the Beerbohms was a ban on cats imposed by Violet.

  Years later Violet told Julian Fane, the young writer she befriended after Sydney died, that the Beerbohms had lived in their cottage, but she said nothing about the code of silence. She told him Max and Florence had been living in Italy and had to return to England because of the war and were homeless. “We were … friends of theirs,” she said, “we had a big house in the country, and we offered them a refuge.” Beerbohm apparently never completely adapted to country living. Whenever he went out, even if it was only to put a letter in the mailbox at the end of the driveway, he dressed in one of his elegant suits, wore a gray homburg, and carried a walking stick.

  Newspapers were hard to get during the war, but the Schiffs had a subscription to the Times. They passed on their copy to Beerbohm, who regularly and mischievously altered it, using pencils exactly the color of the Times’s type, before passing it on to the local schoolmistress. On one occasion he modified an insurance company advertisement showing an elderly couple sitting in armchairs on either side of a snug fire. The picture was captioned, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith have nothing to fear …” Beerbohm drew a diabolical face rising from the flames. His specialty, however, was turning pictures of British dignitaries such as the Lord Mayor of London and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police into likenesses of Goering and Himmler. Whatever the schoolmistress thought of
these alterations, she never said a word, which left Beerbohm bemused.

  The letters Sydney and Max wrote to one another often consisted of gossip and other trivia about mutual friends, but they also reported on every bout with “the wretched influenza” and other infirmities, from time to time extravagantly praised a book of the other’s they had just read, and passed on literary opinions and recommendations. Also, Max wrote numerous times with great sincerity to express his and Florence’s gratitude to the Schiffs for taking them in. After receiving a gracious note from Max expressing the Beerbohms’ appreciation for the Schiffs’ generosity, which included periodic gifts of wine and cigarettes, Sydney replied that he wished he had Max’s gift for saying the right thing at the right time. He added, rather too self-deprecatingly, that the best he could do was “to try in my lame way to say what I think and feel,” which was: “Your and Florence’s presence near us enriches our lives; every time we catch a glimpse of one of you, she running nimbly up the church yard path, you strolling down the lane or standing at your cottage door, we bless the hand of Destiny for guiding you in our direction.”

  Soon afterwards Sydney and Violet sent one of their relatively few explicit invitations to the Beerbohms to join them in celebrating their thirty-first wedding anniversary. For the Schiffs—and perhaps for the Beerbohms—it would appear that despite the unfailing warmth of their letters, those chance glimpses, with intermittent exceptions, constituted just the right amount of enrichment.

  Although most of their correspondence was ephemeral, occasionally the two men exchanged views on more consequential matters. During March and May of 1939 the subject was the collapse of the social order they were born into. They bemoaned the fading of the aristocracy, which they both believed was the great guarantor of social stability and even civilization itself. Beerbohm noted with just a soupçon of irony that “there can’t be any sort of aristocracy without slavery … and now it is ceasing to exist, alas!” But he added in his typically wry fashion that in “a rather remote corner” of his heart he was “pleased that the lives of the majority of my fellow-creatures are happier than they were.” Sydney, who had no gift for wryness nor irony, responded earnestly that “it gratifies me deeply that we feel alike about many things.” Warming to the subject, he said, “The very gentle knight of chivalry was the realization of the highest ideal of mankind” and grumbled that “the new order professes to despise gentlemanhood because its leaders, the so-called intelligentsia, envy and hate their moral and social superiors.” He continued what was fast becoming a screed—although not without a modicum of truth to it—with a blast about self-righteous Russian revolutionary types who advocated proletarian rights but who in reality were just promoting their own selfish interests. Finally, recognizing that he was sounding rather shrill, he asked Beerbohm’s forgiveness for boring him by “letting off this steam.”

  The most extensive exchange of letters, though, was between Max and Violet, whose correspondence began in 1925 and continued well into the 1950s. Many of the letters were written during the war, when the Schiffs and Beerbohms were living within shouting distance of each other, and while most of them were mundane, some lapsed into silly rhyme and others were revealing. One written by Max on November 14, 1939, for example, thanked Violet for the portraits she had drawn of him and Florence. “You have made me look just as I would most like to look,” he wrote. “Will R[othenstein] had flattered me and you have carried the flattery further, you have canonized me.” There is no record that Violet drew portraits or anything else, before then, but a few years later Beerbohm makes another reference to a drawing by Violet. All three, regrettably, have vanished. Beerbohm’s appraisal of her sketches could have been flattering or slyly disparaging. We’ll never know.

  Early in the war the Schiffs also took in an eight-and-a-half-year-old Austrian refugee named Stella Jadwabuik. Violet thought she was intelligent and musically gifted. It seems likely she taught her to play the piano while she was living with them and stimulated her interest in literature. Violet’s maid, “Cam” (Lily Cameron), liked her and took her out from time to time. In the spring of 1945, when she was thirteen, Violet sent her to her parents, who by then were in Palestine. In June Max wrote to her, “We do so hope Stella will be happy … but we wish she were not going for of course you will miss her and, after you had done so much for her, would have liked to see her becoming a young woman.” Although they were not in touch regularly, at one point Violet heard Stella was working as a secretary, which disappointed her. She concluded that her parents were “uneducated and unimaginative people” who were either not capable of or not interested in providing her with the means to develop her mind and talents. Sydney included her in his will with a bequest of three hundred pounds.

  Sometime in 1940 a bomb damaged the London house of a niece of Sydney’s; by then a half dozen or more of their circle of friends had been made homeless by German bombs. But for the most part the war years passed quietly at Abinger. Sydney was no longer writing and the Schiffs’ correspondence dwindled as well. They had their paintings, books, and music to amuse them and their servants to look after them. The war itself must have been little more than a dull murmur in their tranquil corner of Surrey, that is, until August 3, 1944, the tenth anniversary of their purchase of Abinger Manor. At 8 a.m. that morning a German rocket, probably a relatively slow-moving V-1 carrying a ton of high explosives, smashed into the nearby St. James’s Church, which was unoccupied. The blast destroyed the belfry and seriously damaged the roof of the nave and the walls. It also caused extensive damage to the manor. Part of the roof was blown off, all of the windows were broken, and fallen plaster was everywhere. The cottage was barely damaged and neither Beerbohm was hurt. The servants hadn’t arrived yet, and Stella ran out of the house and avoided injury. Sydney was not injured, but Violet was.

  Edward Beddington-Behrens arrived an hour after the rocket attack and found the whole village milling around. Violet was lying on a mattress outside the house. The blast had blown the bedroom door off its hinges and flung it across the room, where it hit her in the back and arm. She had taken a couple of aspirin and was feeling no pain, but one of her vertebrae had been broken. Beddington-Behrens quickly arranged for a room for them at the Sackville Court Hotel in nearby Hove, where they had often stayed. He wanted to leave immediately, but Sydney, with the help of Cam, was still picking through the rubble. He finally found what he was looking for, a light-gray flannel suit and the perfect tie to go with it for the short trip. A number of local friends gathered around the car to say good-bye, and as they drove away Max Beerbohm cried. Violet wrote to Richard Aldington in 1949 that “they were [all] quite gay and cheerful and enjoyed the journey.” They stayed in the hotel for three weeks with Violet in bed the whole time. But she did not get proper medical care, her back never fully healed, and her mobility was impaired for the rest of her life. As uncomfortable and inconvenient as that was, though, it did not unduly disrupt Violet’s normal routine. She had long been accustomed to spending days or even weeks at a time in bed or lying on a couch getting over one ailment or another.

  Sydney, too, had been feeling ill for some time after the bombing. On October 27 Max Beerbohm wrote to Violet that he and Florence hoped Sydney would “soon be better and stronger,” adding, “It must be a frightfully sad and anxious time for you.” Two days later, on Saturday, October 29, Sydney died in the Sackville Court Hotel. He was just over six weeks short of his seventy-sixth birthday. According to the death certificate he died of myocardial degeneration, atheroma, and emphysema or, more simply, heart failure.

  On November 1 Violet wrote to the Beerbohms that Sydney had left a note with his lawyer asking to be cremated. He wanted “no flowers, no mourning, no service.” She told them his ashes would be scattered on “the garden that he loved.” Violet had never seen a dead person and dreaded having to look at Sydney’s body, but when she finally did she thought he looked “incredibly noble (and strangely young).” Those who were th
ere, she wrote, “were moved and impressed as by a great work of art.” This idealized vision of her beloved life partner led her, oddly and unpredictably, to find someone to photograph the body before the coffin slid into the flames. Her last words, before signing the letter with “Much love,” were “I am inutterably [sic] miserable and broken down.”

  In December, although they had been out of touch for many years, Eliot wrote a condolence letter to Violet in which he said, “You were among my oldest friends: I had not seen you for a long time, but I was hoping to come see you at Abinger when conditions became more favorable. This is a grievous loss and I send you, however belatedly, my warmest sympathy and personal sorrow.”

  After thirty-three years during which she had almost never been separated from the love of her life, Violet was alone. Brokenhearted and desolated, but not defeated, she waited out the war at Abinger Manor. When it was over she returned to their London house at 1A Ilchester Place in Kensington.